When someone says he wants to vote Obama because he believes in universal health care or admires European-style socialism or some similar policy reason, I can respect that. I utterly disagree with that voter's perspective on the world, but I respect that if there are certain policies you think America needs, Obama is your man.

But to vote for anyone because you didn't like the other campaign? That makes you an emotionally-driven idiot and too unserious to vote.

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Ha ha. I wrote that before I read the link. Now I've read it, and I see that Kaus also used the word "unserious" to describe such reasoning.

In Arkansas we had a similar situation in our last gubernatorial election. The guy that lost ran a comedic ad with children saying humorous things about about wanting to be bureaucrats and yes-men when they grew up, just like the candidate's opponent. All of the news stations, no doubt fueled by the opponent's press releases, ran big stories about how horrible it was to have children in campaign ads. (Nevermind that the children in the ad were actors, and that they didn't have them delivering the lines in a mean-spirited way.)

I worked as a poll watcher during that election, and I was amazed at how many people I overheard saying that they didn't know who to vote for before, but that it was so awful to have kids in political ads that they would just have to vote against the guy who did.

He's interviewed Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama. He's reported from both the DNC and RNC and each of the presidential debates for NBC News. And six months ago, he was graduating from college. Luke Russert is one of NBC News' newest, and certainly youngest, correspondents. Russert is assigned to cover youth issues, and with youth registration up significantly this year, he has had no shortage of material. But in political terms, just as some on the right and left have questioned Gov. Sarah Palin or Obama's experience, similar questions have been raised of the 23-year-old.

Of course, Russert is also a, well, Russert. When journalism icon Tim Russert died suddenly at the age of 58 on June 13, his son Luke was on the air paying tribute to his dad less than 72 hours later. He certainly looks like him, and with the NBC News job, he's headed down the same career path. But there's more to Russert than just the name. Luke has more than two years of experience as a radio host on XM, and, as he tells us, "This is a business I was raised around."

Applebaum and at least some of the others are just trying to maintain their credentials as relevant pundits despite the new regime.

But this is difficult to pull off effectively. Hitchens went from a lefty to a neocon and is now on the way back ... but he did it pretty convincingly. Whereas Andrew Sullivan or that Balloon guy were so transparent about it that it's impossible to take them seriously.